A TV anchor once asked Martina Navratilova, “How do you maintain your focus and manage to keep playing, even at the age of 43 ?”

Her suave response was, “The ball doesn’t know how old I am. Besides, for 90% of the match I don’t have to focus”.

In a typical tennis match, the players spend less than 15% of their time hitting the ball. During a round of golf, golfers spend less than 20% of their round swinging a golf club, and in American football, the ball is actually in play for only 6% of the game.

In his excellent book, *Stillpower*, Sports Psychologist Garret Kramer says that a key factor to performing well in sports (and in life), is your ability to control the quality and quantity of your “internal dialogue”, understanding:

Performance = Potential_ – internal interference

In other words, you need to stop yourself from stopping yourself.

Sports, business, and indeed, life are played on a 6-inch course_… the space between our ears!